| James Wallbank on Tue, 16 Oct 2018 16:20:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Bad news for Brexit Junkies! - worse news for Labour and remainers |
Hi David, Hi All,I've been a continual participant in online discussion of the national insanity that is Brexit, and have come to a few conclusions. For those of you not based in the UK, the whole debate and internal conflict may appear utterly incomprehensible - but I believe it has brought some uncomfortable truths to the fore:
(1) The "United Kingdom" is not a nation state as Europe knows it. It's actually a shrunken, dwarf empire.
(2) Areas outside the Southeast (both the nations: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) the Regions (The Midlands, The North, The South West) and the unrecognised nations (Cornwall, Mercia, Northumbria) are effectively colonies under occupation by London. London has total, full spectrum dominance over the national narrative.
(3) Britain is suffering from a kind of post-imperial psychosis.(4) Britain is notable in being the only European nation to have failed to rid itself of hereditary rulers. Of the 250 or so Dukes in Britain (that's the highest level of the aristocracy outside royalty) around 180 of them still own the land that their ancestors owned just after the Norman Conquest. That represents nearly 1000 years of occupation. They will stop at NOTHING to retain their hidden power.
(5) Britain's manifestly defective parliamentary system is really window dressing, that conceals other centres of power.
Well, quite clearly I'm beginning to sound like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade - but seriously, the level of democratic failure and delusional thinking at the highest levels of governance are hard to explain in other ways.
All the best, James P.S. I've been working on some Brexit-based art. Anyone interested? On 16/10/2018 09:24, David Garcia wrote:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yates.. The Second Coming) Its a critical juncture in a very very complex moment of a 4 dimensional chess that the UK pretends to be playing with an opponent, but is actually playing with itself (in every sense, including the vulgar sense of wanking our time away). Actually Kier Starmer -the Captain Sensible of the Brexit narrative- is incrementally (and with some skill) inching the Labour Party’s leadership towards a refferendum on the deal (I dislike the sterile populism of the ‘people’s vote' tag but it seems to have caught on). In yesterday’s tragic parliamentary performance May stood isolated and friendless trapped by her own cack-handed trail of bad decisions and contradictory ‘red lines’. Apart from the isolation of someone whose only piece on the chess board is the king which is being relentlessly pushed towards the innevitable one other thing stood out. Accross parliament MPs from all paties except the DUP were increasingly advocating the once unmentionable concept of a 'referndum on the deal’ (or ratification). MPs who have not taken that position before such Dominic Reeve argued for it. This fas has moved from a being a very faint possibility to a distinct option as one of the only ways to resolve political paralysis. This would be not so much a ‘people’s vote’ as the equivalent of the consent form the patient must sign before undergoing a highly risky piece of useless cosmetic surgery about to be perfomed of an ageing dowager suffering from severe delusions of grandure. David Garcia On 16 Oct 2018, at 07:35, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:On 2018-06-17 11:15, Patrice Riemens wrote:BonDi! In today's Guardian/Observer: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/17/europe-losing-interest-brexit-soap-it-has-bigger-worries Cheers, p+2D!That was then - but even earlier there was: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/27/brexit-six-tests-eu-starmer-corbyn (referd to in to-day's Guardian, hence ...) I'm afraid that's going to be the scenario. A Labour party led by an Eurosceptic at heart too afraid to ruffle feathers f its brexiters voters (who mind well have changed their minds in the meantime), and going for the 'extend and pretend' scenario ... Brexit gonna be a disaster - and not only for UK, even if far worse there. Salvini appears to have backtracked on Riace deportations Cheers, no cheers, I dunno p+2D!# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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